Yasuni Green Gold

19 Aug 2010

Ecuador's $3.6bn scheme to save its rainforest from exploitation could point the way to sparing other threatened landscapes

By Esmé McAvoy
Sunday, 8 August 2010

The world's first genuinely green energy deal is about to be sealed. In a plan which could be a blueprint for saving large tracts of the planet from exploitation, a greater value is being put on a pristine wilderness than on the oil that lies beneath.

While the world's industrialised countries are building complex carbon markets to enable them to carry on polluting, Ecuador has come up with a much simpler idea for mitigating climate change: leave the oil underground. It is promising to lock up as much as a fifth of its oil reserves indefinitely, providing rich nations pay out at least half the market value of the oil – some $3.6bn – as compensation.

The trail-blazing proposal was first floated in 2007, but it took a step towards reality last week when the UN Development Programme signed an agreement with the Ecuadorean government to be the independent administrator for the project's trust fund. The accord makes Ecuador the only country in the world offering to leave lucrative oil reserves untapped in an attempt to slow climate change.

18 Jan 2010

For nine months the Government has a plan B to exploit oil in Yasuni. Although, on the one hand, the regime insists that its priority is to make 846 million barrels of crude beneath the sill of the Yasuni, the other handles the alternative of extraction....

15 Jan 2010

War kills people is not advised. Plan B is to exploit the oil of the ITT, was always ahead of the Plan A, that of keeping it from the very day of submission of the proposal ... It was enough to give a review of the board meetings and Petroecuador Petroamazonas plans.

It was obvious: the fault was to have the First World, imperialism, colonialism, developed pelucones ... We will do! If we are global example of conservation, if not a single cedar trunk escapes the Yasuni, we've done everything possible to protect and guarantee decent life and survival of people living in the park are "contacted" or "uncontacted".

The President has said as usual. Has another term (the third or fourth time that does the same ...) and hardly taxpayers could still believe it may have serious so-called "big small country proposal. He kicked the board of his own ministers (some believe that it would change with the course of history) who were ready to sign a first document. Neither wanted nor did he ever stop exploiting this oil. I had to get out of the propaganda that had him tied up in the international arena. He found that the chain best place Saturday.

Potential funders are now guilty of failure of the strategy of conservation wing of the Ecuadorian government (which has not been adept the Head of State).

They (the President has said) have no right to ask about charity accounts (of so many millions of dollars) to throw on the hat of Ecuadorian mendicant. The conditions that they impose are the companies responsible for running it all ... do not accept the sovereignty or any conditions beyond (to show the operating block 17, which has not yet off a generator despite the offices of the Ministry of Environment has ignored or code of conduct).

Those who bet the Yasuni-ITT campaign will occupy the ranks of the disillusioned. I prefer, and I have said in several articles, the reality principle.

It is branded (at least so it seems) the court. The exploitation of the ITT project is being implemented fully: while some countries visited do not know how many others worked on the banks of the Napo looking for where to spend at Eden Pañacocha tube to mix with the heavy crude from ITT.

It is time to work on the reality principle, to see if we can defend life in the deep forest that is already bored by the earthquake and which has been fertile ground for exploitation. Or is that this exploitation will be made sovereignly and unconditionally kicks?.

Fander Falconí, Foreign Affairs Minister of Ecuador, has resigned due to differences with president Rafael Correa in the issue of the country's plan to protect the Yasuni reservation at the Amazon forest. The president of Ecuador has also set a deadline for the project. If expectations not met, the Amazon gets it.